S133.
Reterritorializing Space: What Can American Letters Learn from Diné Writers?
Saturday, March 26, 2022
10:35 am to 11:50 am
Diné writers, often expected to speak of their work for its content and aesthetic alone, carry a compounded burden since settler-colonial patterns of subjection promote primitivism; genocidal legislative history; and Hollywood-glossed, southwest aesthetics, including violence and savagism. This panel presents Diné craft methods and Dinétics (Diné aesthetics/poetics), which are erased or obscured (at best) and violated or made meaningless (at worst), to interrogate false narratives as an act of restoration.
Participants
Esther G. Belin is a Diné artist and writer and currently a faculty mentor in the low-res MFA program at the Institute for American Indian Arts. She has two poetry books: From the Belly of My Beauty and Of Cartography.
Jake Skeets is the author of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, winner of the National Poetry Series, American Book Award, Whiting Award, and Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He is from the Navajo Nation and teaches at Diné College.
Manny Loley
Natanya Ann Pulley is a Diné prose writer. Her short story collection With Teeth was published in 2019, and links to her work can be found online at natanyapulley.com. She's the founding/managing editor of Hairstreak Butterfly Review and is an assistant professor at Colorado College.
